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I'd like for you to meet one of my favorite people in the whole world. He's a private guy and though he's okay with my writing this post, he'd rather I kept his identity a secret for now. He calls himself The Toadman. But I should warn you, what you are about to read isn't what you'd expect. He doesn't lick toads for fun, eat amphibians or live under a bridge. He simply loves toads more than anything in the world and what he does in his free time proves it.

If you ever meet The Toadman, he'll seem just like anyone else in the Motor City. He'll probably talk about Michigan State University, the Detroit Tigers and how great it is to live in his hometown of Clawson. But what you won't get right out of the gate is what I call his "green side". That's the side of him that's comfortable discussing his life-long passion.

Since we were kids, The Toadman has been obsessed with frogs and toads. The day I got my drivers license he talked me into traveling 20 miles north to a swampy area because "that's where they have the best ones". I know it sounds strange, but just as a bird watcher is able to detect the presence of certain birds by how they chirp, The Toadman is able to do the same with toads. It's uncanny really.

Did I mention that for the past 2 decades he's lived with toads and sometimes sets up professional photo shoots with them? Read the rest

With a 20 percent increase in patients during the Major League Baseball playoff games in Chicago, the Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center is preparing for a very busy World Series weekend there. Of course they expect alcohol-related injuries, from falls to DWI-related auto accidents, but cardiac issues are also expected to drive emergency room visits from emotional fans.

As part of their post-Olympics publicity tours, U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team members Laurie Hernandez and Madison Kocian were invited to throw out first pitches at two respective baseball games. Read the rest

According to a medical report published in the January 1977 issue of Diseases of the Colon & Rectum(great bathroom reading! - ed.), a 49-year-old man was admitted to a San Francisco hospital complaining of severe pain. A "firm, fixed, round object" was found to be lodged high in his rectum. The man then admitted that he and his sexual partner had celebrated the Oakland A's World Series win by having a baseball inserted into his ass.

After the physicians tried various techniques to remove it, the baseball was finally "skewered with a corkscrew instrument" and pushed through an incision in the fellow's colon.

According to the medical report, "Follow-up examination a year later revealed normal bladder and rectal functions."

“Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers and characters, who as a player was a mainstay of 10 Yankee championship teams and as a manager led both the Yankees and Mets to the World Series — but who may be more widely known as an ungainly but lovable cultural figure, inspiring a cartoon character and issuing a seemingly limitless supply of unwittingly witty epigrams known as Yogi-isms — died on Tuesday. He was 90.”

Yogi Berra stands at home plate, 2008. REUTERS

“You can observe a lot just by watching,” he is reputed to have declared once, describing his strategy as a manager.

“If you can’t imitate him,” he advised a young player who was mimicking the batting stance of the great slugger Frank Robinson, “don’t copy him.”

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” he said, giving directions to his house. Either path, it turned out, got you there.

“Nobody goes there anymore,” he said of a popular restaurant. “It’s too crowded.”

It was RoboCop Day in Detroit yesterday and the man-machine threw the ceremonial first pitch at last night's Detroit Tigers game, although sadly it wasn't Peter Weller in the suit (nor Joel Kinnaman); meanwhile, the city's crowdfunded RoboCop bronze statue is slated for completion later this year. Read the rest

A new bit of footage showing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt walking, a rare sight after he was paralyzed by polio, was publicly shown for the first time; the clip was shot in 1937 at Washington, DC's Griffith Stadium by baseball player Jimmie DeShong. Read the rest